Track Mirror – Brainstorming ‘Black Mirror’ Episodes With Running

At the end of 2017, Netflix dropped the latest season of Black Mirror, which is a recommended series if you’re into shows with a Twilight-Zone kind of vibe. The show manages to blend science fiction and psychological terror through technology in a dystopian society. It’s a creepy game of “What If”.

The CITIUS MAG Slack channel tends to stray away from running at times and the latest season was a topic of discussion on Tuesday afternoon since most people have seen the six latest episodes by now. We decided to have some fun and brainstorm possible “Track Mirror” storylines.

– A GPS watch where the distance starts going downward or a treadmill that causes time to speed up around it.

– What is President Trump is right? Trump believes that the human body is like a battery with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depletes. What if runners discovered what that amount was and the toll that it was taking on our livelihood or if we can use that to our benefit while chasing personal bests?

– In the future, doping is legalized. People can take whatever they want in hopes that they think it will benefit their careers. A PEDs company comes about that pretty much sets up an academy for young athletes to dope and become the best. Each athlete works with a doping specialist. In this society the young students don’t know that doping is bad. At the academy, there’s one instructor who has a change of heart when his athlete dies and then tries to warn everyone of the dangers and ugly reality of doping in sports.

– Remember that movie “Her” with Joaquin Phoenix? Well in the future runners can be coached by artificial intelligence and an episode can tell a love story of a post-collegiate runner who falls in love with that “coach”

– Something with virtual reality where you can run anywhere in the world and maybe with anyone from history assuming that they can hold a conversational pace with you

– You can now buy and sell the memory and experience of running the best races of some runners. Want to know what it was like for Billy Mills to win gold in Tokyo? $9.99 and you’ll have that memory implanted for you to experience in Mills’ shoes. Unfortunately, the runners who accomplished those feats lose the memories and are selling them to make money because they didn’t make enough in their career.

– An episode where we finally have the technology to clone dead runners and have them race again but something goes very wrong when they’re not as competitive as they would hope against the current era of runners.

– Paul Chelimo cryogenically preserved to try and compete at the 3020 Olympics. Or maybe this could be something worth looking into for the entire Nike Oregon Project.

– Archeologists come across a pair of Nike Zoom Vaporfly 4%, fuel belts and November Project t-shirts and try to piece together the history of what runners use to be

– A guy who loves wearing short shorts to run but can’t ever take them off

– What is the IOC changed its rules to allow athletes with prosthetics like the carbon-fiber legs that Oscar Pistorius or Markus Rehm wear and the episode follows the story of the first crazed athlete who wants an Olympic medal so bad that he cuts off his legs to gain an edge on the competition. He wins and unfortunately inspires others to do the same. This might be too dark.

Got an interesting storyline for Track Mirror? We’ll include it in the post. Just email us [email protected] with your submission.